It's been a while, a long while, especially since my last post concerned a bachelor party and was loaded with hints about this very post here. While I'd like to say nice things, while I'd like to have kept my chin up, that last post left off before I found myself busier than ever with school and work, at two jobs and four hours of homework per class per day. So I apologize for the hiatus, needless to say I didn't really want to take one.
Now, this post isn't directed toward my parents, but to everyone who reads my series of brain farts I call a blog. Firstly, thank you, your support does keep me going and if this blog is the only excuse I have to continue writing, then so be it I'll keep writing.
Now, the title may be slightly controversial, so I may have to explain myself. About two years ago I had my last great depression. I drank alcohol excessively and felt as though I was dying inside every day. I sat in a tear-filled brooding mess kicking and screaming about how every problem I've ever had was someone else's fault.
Eventually I sought help and after a short run with some antidepressants I began to turn my life around. But along the way came something quite dear to me. I felt, with no small semblance of doubt that there was two personalities living inside of my body. One who was weak-minded, angry, vindictive, victimized, unproductive, and useless, and another who was in every way the exact foil of this personality. I called this new, cleaner personality Alexander Kodama, and throughout the next year fought tooth and nail to kill Alex Harder, the child who refused to move on.
Over time I gained more and more control over myself, I found myself able to do next to anything I set my mind to, I became stronger, smarter, more adaptable, and significantly more productive. And the metaphor of these two personalities manifested itself in the form of a complete rejection of Alex Harder and everything he was.
Those of you who know Alex Harder know that he intended to become an Astrophysicist. He spent countless hours staring at the stars and pouring over textbooks. But suddenly all of that began to change. Now, even after nearly seven years, when I look up at a clear sky I relive what happened to me, and Alex Harder relived those moments every day as he struggled to force himself to still love Astronomy.
Alex ruined his relationships one at a time. He sought out depressed and victimized friends, He began to hate the normality some people could comfortably breathe in. He hated family members, blamed them, refused to see what it was that they did for him. He hurt those he loved or smothered them into hating him.
He was depressed for seven straight years, suicidal for many of them and had no reason to pursue a future that had abandoned him.
I know it may sound strange for me to speak of myself in the third person. But rape, no matter what form it takes, severely alters the state of a person's mind. Victims of statutory rape are particularly vulnerable, with male victims being among the most likely to commit the act in adulthood, and it is true without a doubt that most pedophiles are victims of sexual assault themselves. But I HAVE to refer to myself this way, because just yesterday, I buried Alex Harder, what small amount of him that was left.
I am sorry to say it, but I am not Alex for a reason. And, though many of you are family, I will heatedly say that you are referring to the dead when you call me Alex. And so all of his memories, to me, are that of another person. I motivate myself by saying "you are not Alex Harder", I get up in the morning knowing that Alexander Kodama will do great things in his life, and now that Alex is gone, I can finally find the strength to move forward proud of who I am and who I will become.
Eventually it was time for me to move on, and a year ago I simply took it.
But just before I felt complete enough to take my new name I got a phone call, one that threatened to risk everything. The man who sexually assaulted me when I was a young teenager, who taught me to use drugs to escape from my problems, was suing my sister for custody of my two nieces.
This, I saw, was my chance to finally lay Alex Harder to rest. and during that phone call I admitted what had happened to my sister, a woman who helped raise me, for the first time. Blurting it out that I was raped and repeatedly molested. Forcing facts on a person who knew nothing, and hearing nothing but tears in reply. Telling her repeatedly how much I loved her; I fought on and explained everything I could. Explaining that it was not her fault and that there is nothing that we can do about it now. It was a long drive home that day and one of the best things I may have ever done, no matter how painful it was to do.
But I learned a lot in these years, both before and while I was on the stand.
Firstly, the system is inherently against the rape victim, especially for a male. For starters, the sheriff who filed my report ignored or completely misrepresented some of the information given. There was no comfort in that meeting, and to be frank, him being male and of the same body type as the man who assaulted me, my testimony was less than cooperative. The lawyers assume you are lying right off the bat, due to the fact that rapes generally take years for the victim to process and something everyone calls "courage" to admit. To this day many of my friends and family have no idea what had happened. And though I'm willing to change that now, it has created many rifts, many painful memories, many failed relationships.
Next, being male there is a serious perceived weakness in being victimized in such a way, and a whole world of ignorance. Misunderstandings of this have completely and irreparably destroyed relationships in my life. Most notably being that with my father, with whom I have only recently worked to repair. But this dynamic of weakness leads to aggressive tendencies, feelings and thoughts that are immoral in every respect appear seemingly out of thin air simply because you want a release from a perceived femininity.
Lastly, I have never in my life felt more vulnerable, more in pain, more barely able to hold myself together, than when I admitted in front of people I know and don't know, people I love and hate, that a man had forced himself on me and that I was powerless to stop him. Never have I needed more support than yesterday, or the day I had to talk to my father about it, or the day I panicked and admitted to my mother only to get responses from them, which I will not elaborate on here, that broke my heart in every possible way.
But saying it in front of Mr. Robert's English class, while pissed at a good friend, was cathartic. There is no vulnerability when you use it as a weapon. And I hope I never do such a thing again.
I've spent years struggling with the fact that I never joined a group that fights sexual assault. I spent years worrying about the fate of my nieces, I spent years in constant disappointment in myself for not being stronger sooner.
And so when October 2016 came around, effectively saying to my sister that I will fight tooth and nail and that I am no longer interested in protecting myself, I knew that I could finally start doing the right thing. And so on top of my schoolwork I worked with lawyers to, most uncomfortably, complete a ten page affidavit detailing the events as they occurred. Making draft after draft, I could barely breathe.
On top of that having to be front of a group of lawyers attending a deposition in my lawyer's office, doing everything I could not to break down as the opposition lawyer skirted around discussing the rape and the molestation I endured for years.
And finally getting called to testify. And being in that room, with the judge to my right, a man who ruined my life directly in front of me, and my sister crying in her chair, I spoke in detail about how I was repeatedly drugged, how one night a man bent me over on the concrete in a barn, and forced his seed into me. I sat there and explained how the sky that night was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I explained how the man would drink daily, how he regularly suggested I drink, how he offered what I consider no different from child pornography as a more suitable stimulant for someone my age than to view a nineteen year old. I expressed how he ruined my life, my sex life, my love life, every aspect of who I was for almost an entire decade.
I forced myself to speak, and choked back tears. I fought eye contact with a man I had avoided for seven years with every fiber of my being. Yet I watched as he took notes with no expression of guilt, shame, or disgust. A blank face sat directly opposite me and soaked in every word I said, wrote it all down as if it was the most normal thing he had ever heard. I can't even begin to describe how I held back anger. How much I wanted to scream and yell. I questioned myself how it could be that such a person could exist, how while being accused of atrocity a person could shamelessly treat it as a nonissue.
And when it was all said and done, I left the room, sat in a waiting room, and cried more than I had cried in years. Real tears, tears that reminded me that it was over. But I was not crying because of the pain, or the stress, no I cried because I was saying goodbye to the boy that was victimized. I cried to let him go free and to no longer live a life considering who has control over my actions, because from now and until forever it will always be me and not him.
My father once told me that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue. But he failed to mention that at the end of the day, the pigeon still flies and the statue still stands. I've skipped classes for this, chosen not to do homework, chosen not to go to work. But that has to be acceptable, and I have to say that nothing I've ever toiled with was so difficult or completely irreversible an issue, nothing is the end of everything. Life on this world has fought mass extinction and every time it fights back.
We are life. We must fight to survive and find who we are, and we cannot let anyone else tell us we're someone else.
If I may make a request, I want you all to stand up to yourself now and forever. The world needs your ambition, not your Netflix binges.
Fight temptations that serve you no benefit.
Stand up to your demons and make a name for yourself.
Be courageous and take a day off when you need it, knowing that you don't want to.
And never, ever think that because you are the victim of any abuse you get to live a life on a bed eating chips and suffer in luxury.
No; it is the victims, the hurt people, the ones who struggle to find something better who stand out in eternity as immortals.
Build yourself, be yourself, fight for your life.
You have no reason to pursue happiness, but every reason to peruse a better self-image.
And if you think you're satisfied never taking that trip to Europe, never writing that book, or living in a world of "I could have been ___"
Then watch me and people like me overtake you, and prove to me that your life was better lived.
I love you all, and thank you for knowing me.
love,
-Alexander
